Posts Tagged ‘cross-browser’

Today marks the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3. By all reports, an good browser with great features - and when the site is back up and running, I’ll probably download it myself.

But despite the increased adoption of alternate browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser, and will continue to be the most-used browser for the foreseeable future.

Many will disagree - however, let me explain why I believe this:

The problem is not on the user end. There are many thousands of alternate browser users who are enthusiastically spreading the word. Personally, I recommend Firefox to just about everyone - and most have tried it, and prefer it to IE. No - there is definitely no problem getting users to switch away from IE.

This is something I simply don’t understand. But it appears that there are many developers out there who are unaware of either the existence of browsers other than IE, or just don’t care to learn how to make their sites work on other browsers.

But the problem doesn’t stop with the developers. The real problem lies with the management of the companies who hire these developers. They hire people who work only with IE, because they are not aware, or don’t care, that there are other browsers.

Now, I can’t imagine why any company would knowingly neglect over 20% of its potential customer base, so the only conclusion I can reach is that this failure is due to ignorance. The people running these companies either don’t know about alternate browsers, don’t know the number of people using alternate browsers, or don’t know that different browsers require different coding.

But the fact is, this is rather typical of many websites. For some reason, it seems that many companies are either not aware or just don’t care about obvious, easy to fix bugs on their websites. Proof of this can easily be seen if you are a FireFox user: install the FireBug plug-in, turn it on, and just watch the errors pile up. As I write this, I see 18 errors showing - some from sites that I’ve linked to here. (Hey, CenterNetworks, did you know that your JavaScript function srExecute is not defined?)

What’s really frustrating, though, is the total lack of response or concern from these companies when you tell them about a problem.

Last week, I needed to rent a truck to deliver some servers to our new data center. When you need a truck for hauling, who else do you think of but U-haul? So I went to the U-haul Reservations page and tried to reserve a truck. When I clicked on the “continue” button, I got no response, until I eventually got a server time-out error. No big deal - I’ll just give it another try. After all, sometimes servers go down.

Well, I tried multiple times over three days, using different browsers (because I know that many companies don’t seem to realize that there are other browsers besides Internet Explorer) . But even with all those tries, I still was getting a server time-out.

Your web browser must be set to allow cookies to complete a reservation online. Please enable cookies and try our website again…go to http://reservations.uhaul.com/ and click on either One-Way or In-Town to proceed with your quote. Once you have received your quote and are ready to make a reservation, you will be prompted to enter your contact information.

Let me get this straight: me not having cookies set is the reason their server isn’t responding? Well, I sent them specific details explaining how to reproduce the bug that I was getting. So far, I have heard nothing back, and the problem still exists.

But there are times when bugs on websites cause more than just a little frustration. I recently purchased tickets to take my family to see Phantom of the Opera at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. I went to their online reservations page, found some good seats, and entered my information. But when I submitted the form, it failed to process - apparently because the billing address in my OCPAC account was different from my current billing address.

Now, I had entered the new address in the previous form. So I went back and tried it again, and this time I noticed that FireBug was showing an error on every keypress! It turns out that the form was using window.event - which is proprietary to Internet Explorer. The data was not getting through when I submitted the form, and it looked to be related to this.

So I tried to get the tickets using IE, but was unable to find any decent tickets this time. At this point, I was getting rather frustrated, and called the ticket center. It turns out that the tickets that had been on hold while I was trying to buy them had since been sold to someone else, and now there were no good orchestra level seats remaining. I ended up having to get balcony seats way off to the side, because their web programmer didn’t know how to make a cross-browser compliant website.

A complaint made by their website, as well as one made by phone, has gone unanswered for over a month now.

I simply don’t comprehend why companies are so resistant to dealing with problems like this - problems that should be trivial for any competent developer to address. Is it that the people in management are unaware of the problems, or is it that they just don’t care? Or is it because it’s so difficult to find competent programmers?

Ultimately, what needs to happen is that the managers of these companies need to understand that people use a variety of browsers, and that they are hiring developers who either don’t know how to develop for multiple browsers, or who don’t care. And these managers need to understand that this lack of support can cost them, especially when the alternative browsers are now reaching as much as 20% of the market.

But, sadly, I don’t see this ever happening. Not when even supposedly web-savvy companies like Google use javascript:void(0) on their personalized home page.